Forget about ads inside Facebook...

Great article on the ongoing battle between Facebook and Google in this month's Wired.

This passage smacked me upside the head:

"Just as Google's AdSense program sells ads on any participating Web site, Connect and Open Stream will eventually push Facebook-brokered advertising to any member site or app. But unlike with AdSense, Facebook's ads could be exquisitely tailored to their targets. "No one out there has the data that we have," says COO Sandberg."

I'm not sure why I didn't realize this before, but the ability to use Facebook data (via Connect) to behaviorally target people outside of the Facebook domain is an incredibly powerful opportunity. Think of all the ways you can slice and dice your target profile with anything in a profile being fair game, and then imagine distributing customized ads across the rest of the web based on varied profile types. That could lead to several smaller, more targeted buys, with iterations of creative tailored to micro-segements. Higher click through rates (and higher CPC) sure to follow. But I'm jumping ahead; first they need to become everyone's gateway to web content (currently in progress - see article).

there's more than one way to fail

Check out this great article about the disparity in coverage of the Iranian election protests between old media and new in this week's Economist. In particular, I like how they point out the often overlooked downside of twitter - navigating mountains of unstructured content (yes, hashtags help, but not much).

"Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do."

Ironic fail?